Boys Who Rocked the World: Heroes from King Tut to Bruce Lee

King Tutankhamun

APPROXIMATELY 1347–1329 BC PHAROAH EGYPT

As my eyes grew accustomed to the light . . . I was struck dumb with amazement.

—HOWARD CARTER, ARCHAEOLOGIST, REFERRING TO THE DISCOVERY OF KING TUT’S TOMB

Ten-year-old Tutankhamun nervously approached the great Karnak Temple. The last in a long line of rulers, young Tut was to be crowned pharaoh of Egypt. It was now his job to oversee the largest empire in the world, which stretched from Africa to Asia. Will I be remembered as a great leader too? he wondered as he walked past the great monuments and statues of the pharaohs who had ruled before him. The cheers from the crowd at the temple grew to a deafening roar as the boy entered. Would the boy pharaoh bring prosperity back to Egypt? He was their last hope.

Several priests poured sacred water from golden urns over Tut. Then they placed the magnificent three crowns of Egypt on his head. There was the tall, white crown of Lower Egypt, then the red crown of Upper Egypt, and finally the khepresh, a blue crown representing Egypt’s vast armies. Thousands of Egyptians looked on in hushed silence as the priests balanced the triple crown on Tut’s small head.

Even though his reign was brief—only nine years—Tut’s dream to be remembered came true. Though he ruled over three thousand years ago, he is now the most well-known of all the Egyptian pharaohs. As ruler, he helped return a crumbling empire to its former prosperity and stability. His tomb, filled with an immense wealth of gold and priceless artifacts—as well as a mysterious curse—has only helped solidify young Tut’s legend.

Pharaoh means one who resides in the palace.

King Tut was born in 1347 BC in Egypt’s rich, green Nile valley. His name, Tutankhamun, meant strong bull, which suited Tut well. As a young man, he was praised for his strength and skills as a hunter of ostriches, peacocks, ibexes, gazelles, and wild hippos. His father was Pharaoh Akhenaten, who was not well-liked by Egyptians since he had defied the traditional religion, which had many gods, and singled out one god as worthy of worship. Akhenaten had also moved the capitol from Thebes to Amarna, further angering his people.

Growing up in Amarna, young Tut was a bit of a slacker. His older brother, Smenkare, was next in line to be pharaoh, so not much was expected of Tut. When he wasn’t learning to read or write Egyptian hieroglyphs (pictures that represent words), Tut did what most kids do today: he goofed off. He hunted and raced around in chariots, played Senet, his favorite board game, and swam in the Nile with his siblings.

When Tut was seven years old, he received the shock of his life. Smenkare got very sick and died. Suddenly, Tut was destined to inherit all his father’s duties as pharaoh of Egypt. No more slacking—it was time to cram! Tut’s lessons got a lot harder as he prepared for his new role. Good thing he crammed. . . . Just two years later his father died. Only nine years old, Tut was now the ruler of the Egyptian empire and had the huge responsibility of unifying Egypt after his father’s rocky reign.

Tut decided to bring back the traditional religion his father had outlawed and to return the capital to Thebes. When the young pharaoh moved back to the capital, a coronation ceremony was arranged so that all of Egypt could be introduced to their new boy king. Once crowned, Tut quickly ordered the rebuilding of the old temples that had fallen into disrepair during his father’s reign. With the guidance of priests, he performed ceremonies to improve the harvest. (Most people in Egypt made their living from farming.) Tut was also in charge of Egypt’s gigantic army, and with the help of his military advisers, he won several battles.

In his tomb, Tut was buried with over 140 pieces of jewelry, including 15 rings, 13 bracelets, many amulets, and a crown made of pure gold. He also had 93 pairs of shoes and 415 statues of servants to serve him in the afterlife.

By age fifteen, Tut was growing into a strong and trustworthy leader. He brought stability back to Lower and Upper Egypt, and comfort to people who honored the traditional religion. Tut was also proving to be a skilled negotiator, helping to solidify relations between Egypt’s neighbors, Assyria and Babylonia. Egypt, which had experienced dark days during Akhenaten’s reign, was making a comeback. Crops along the Nile were bountiful, and Egypt’s many storehouses overflowed.

But King Tut’s reign ended almost as quickly as it began. At the age of eighteen, King Tutankhamun suddenly died. No one is sure why. Was it disease? Was it an injury from one of his chariot rides? It’s still a mystery today. Many scholars believe that Tut was assassinated by someone close to him who wanted his power. Maybe Tut was becoming too independent and would no longer listen to his advisers.

Whatever the cause of his death, it was a shock to the Egyptian people. The Egyptians believed that in order to preserve a person’s ka, or soul, the dead body had to be mummified and placed in a tomb. Since Tut’s death was unexpected, the Egyptians had to work frantically to put together a tomb for their king. Inside the tomb, they placed items that would keep their king entertained and comfortable in the afterlife. Then they created false chambers and hidden passageways to lead robbers away from its many treasures. Three thousand years passed, and shifting sands, grain by grain, covered the burial area—Tut’s tomb vanished from sight.

Much of what we know today about King Tut’s life comes from his tomb. In 1922 archaeologist Howard Carter uncovered a buried chamber in an area of Egypt called the Valley of the Kings, where most of the pharaohs were buried. Behind a secret door, Carter found the tomb of King Tut, almost perfectly preserved. It contained amazing artifacts—a golden mask and coffin, food vessels, jewelry, chariots, bows and arrows, statues of servants, game boards, furniture, and a magnificent throne.

Among the treasures, Carter discovered a clay tablet with hieroglyphs on it that warned: Death shall slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh. He also found a statue that read: It is I who drive back the robbers of the tomb with the flames of the desert. I am the protector of Tutankhamen’s grave. With his eyes on the other treasures, Carter quickly forgot the warning words until two weeks later when Lord Carnarvon, the man who had paid for the expedition, got sick and died. Some thought it was from malaria, but others believed it was King Tut’s curse. Next, a friend of Lord Carnarvon visited the tomb. The following day he got a high fever and suddenly died! Soon all sorts of deaths were linked to the discovery of Tut’s tomb. Within ten years of opening the tomb, almost thirty people connected to the excavation had mysteriously died.

In ancient Egypt, men and women both wore black eye makeup made of lead ore. The makeup was considered stylish but also helped protect the Egyptians from eye infections and the harsh, desert sun.

Finally, Dr. Ezzeddin Taha, who had examined several people involved in the excavation of Egyptian tombs, noticed that many of them suffered from a strange fungal infection. His research revealed that some fungi could survive for up to four thousand years in mummies and tombs! Symptoms of the infection were a high fever and an upper respiratory infection. Dr. Taha made a public statement saying that superstitions about King Tut’s curse were silly, especially now that he had found the real reason people were dying. Coincidentally, after making this important scientific breakthrough, Dr. Taha died in a car crash. People today still debate whether Taha died because of the curse or because he had the fungal infection, which may have caused him to pass out and crash the car.

X-rays of the mummified Tut show that he might have died from a head injury—more proof for those who think he was murdered.

King Tut’s death and tomb may be shrouded in mystery, but it is no mystery that, as one of the youngest pharaohs of Egypt, his memory lives on. His leadership and diplomacy skills helped strengthen Egypt’s economy and return people’s confidence in the pharaohs. His short life, his amazing tomb, and its curse have made him the most famous and well-known of all Egyptian kings. Like the ancient scribes of Egypt wrote, Let your name go forth, while your mouth is silent. For no other pharaoh has this been more true than for King Tut.

HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?

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My plan is to get high up in the government and then propose the eco-car bill. There would be a recycling program where people would trade in their gas guzzling cars for a small amount of money. Charging stations for electric cars will be placed all around the country, and the electricity will be inexpensive. This bill would make it so a lot more people will use public transportation. This will affect many people because it will boost awareness about global warming and reduce our carbon footprint.

DUGAN MARIEB AGE 13

Galileo Galilei

1564–1642 INVENTOR AND PHYSICIST ITALY

Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. . . . Galileo was one of the first to argue that man could hope to understand how the world works, and, moreover, that we could do this by observing the real world.

—STEPHEN HAWKING, THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

Galileo was bored. After a week of studying math at the university, he had been looking forward to a good Sunday church service to fill his brain with more spiritual thoughts. Unfortunately, the visiting priest was so dull that Galileo couldn’t keep his head from dropping onto his chest. Snapping it to attention, he overcompensated and threw his head back too far. Something on the ceiling caught his eye. A lamp, hanging from a chain high overhead, was swaying in the air currents. Its rhythmic arcs almost put him back to sleep, but then Galileo noticed something that surprised him: there seemed to be a pattern to the swings.

Wide awake now, he used his own pulse to time how long it took the lantern to swing from one end of its arc to the other. He realized something: each swing took the same amount of time, whether the lantern had swung wide in a new breeze, or had settled into a barely noticed sway when the air currents quieted.

Duh, you might say; that seems obvious. But it wasn’t a duh then. People four hundred years ago had hardly a clue about what made the physical world work. With this observation, eighteen-year-old Galileo discovered the way to invent the first accurate mechanical clock, beginning a lifetime of experiments to figure out how the world works. He was the world’s first physicist (a scientist who studies matter and energy and how they interact).

Galileo said that a lock of wool and a piece of lead, if in a vacuum (with no air resistance), would fall at the same rate. In 1971, astronaut David Scott stood on the moon and dropped a feather and a hammer at the same time. They both fell side by side to the moon’s surface. He remarked: This proves that Mr. Galileo was correct.

Galileo’s curiosity would nearly get him killed later in life, but it also started humans down the road of knowledge to mechanics, electricity, radiation, and nuclear reactions. From a boring church service in Pisa in 1583 to a walk on the moon in 1969, and finally to nanotechnology today, there have been curious men and women, pulling more and more from the spool of scientific knowledge that Galileo started to unravel.

Galileo’s greatness came from his skepticism: he refused to believe something just because everyone else did. He came by this naturally; as a boy, Galileo had been taught by his father, who hated close-minded people, especially if they were in a position of authority.

By the time Galileo was eleven, his father could not keep up with his thirst for knowledge, so he sent his son to a monastery school. The peaceful life inside the monastery walls totally appealed to Galileo, so much so that, at thirteen, he volunteered to begin training as a monk. His dad was horrified and instantly nixed the idea: Galileo needed to pick a career that would generate enough money to help support the family. And four hundred years ago, just like today, doctors got paid big bucks. So, at his father’s insistence, when Galileo was seventeen he entered the University of Pisa to study medicine. But he was not interested in medicine, and he argued with his father to be allowed to study math—a profession that would help him figure out how the world worked. He must have been a good arguer because his father gave in. As Galileo later said of his passion for math:

The Catholic Church was very powerful in Italy in Galileo’s day. In Rome, everyone was Catholic, and one out of every twelve people was a priest or a nun.

 . . . the universe cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it . . .²

At Pisa, Galileo kept on arguing with people who supposedly knew more. He argued so much that his teachers nicknamed him Il Attaccabrighe, the Wrangler. What was he arguing about? Galileo felt that the facts they were teaching should not be accepted until someone had tested them.

When he was twenty-one, Galileo left school without earning a degree. Four years later, he was back, this time as an instructor. He began teaching math and went back to his old argumentative ways. At that time, universities were still following the teachings of Aristotle, who had lived 1,800 years earlier. One thing Aristotle had said was that the heavier an object was, the faster it would fall. Aristotle had never actually tried it; it just seemed to logically flow from other things he had observed.

Galileo easily proved this idea wrong: he climbed the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two lead balls, one weighing much more than the other. As his critics watched, an 1,800-year-old truth was overturned: both objects fell to the earth at exactly the same speed. By using public stages like this, Galileo became popular and changed many people’s minds. But his popularity and ideas also created enemies, and he got fired from his job. Fortunately, friends got him a job at the University of Padua, near Venice. It had a reputation as being more open to new ideas, and Galileo was happy there. His fame grew as he invented and designed machines and instruments for various rulers and kings.

In 1609 the telescope was invented in Holland. It could magnify objects only up to three times, and it was merely used as a toy at parties. But Galileo saw other uses for the telescope and set out to improve it. By 1610 he had made a telescope so strong, it could be used in war to spy on approaching enemies. When he presented his telescope to the ruler of Venice, he was given a huge pay raise and a job for life. Orders poured in for his telescopes, and he became even more famous. He used his most powerful scopes—ones that could magnify an object thirty times—to look at the sky and discovered that the moon is full of mountains and craters. He also discovered another thing Aristotle was wrong about.

Aristotle had claimed that the Earth was the center of the universe—that the sun and all the other stars and planets revolved around the Earth. And the powerful Catholic Church agreed with him. If the Earth was the center of the universe, then that proved that the smartest creature on Earth, man, must be the center of the universe as well. Anyone who disagreed with this idea was considered an enemy of the church. And, at that time, the church was the same as the government. The punishment for disagreeing with it was torture or death.

Even though the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had already said that the sun was the center of the universe, very few people believed him. Galileo did. His improved telescope allowed Galileo to prove that many of Copernicus’s ideas were right. Galileo wrote a book, The Starry Messenger, arguing that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Instead, he said the Earth revolved around the sun. This book got him in big trouble. At age fifty-one, Galileo was forced to withdraw his ideas or risk death. To save his life, Galileo said that he had been wrong.

For the rest of his life, Galileo battled the church over his beliefs. Church officials often threatened him with prison, torture, and death in order to force him to lie about his discoveries, but he never totally gave in. He always continued writing and teaching the truth, even when the pope and the Inquisition (the Catholic Church’s secret police) came after him. For the last eight years of his life, Galileo had to live under house arrest inside his home in Florence—but he never stopped conducting his experiments.

Some heroes would die rather than admit something that they don’t believe in. Why didn’t Galileo defend what he believed to the death? Maybe he wanted to live to make more discoveries. Or perhaps he knew that, whether he lived or died, the truth would eventually be known. And of course, it was. Today everyone, even the Catholic Church, believes that Galileo was right.

In the end, Galileo’s greatest legacy is not any one of his inventions or discoveries, but his search for truth, even in the face of ignorant laws and rulers. In Galileo’s day, the enemy of truth was people clinging to unproven beliefs. What is the enemy of truth today?

ROCK ON!

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JACOB BARNETT

Jacob Barnett shocked his parents when, at three years old, he was solving five-thousand-piece puzzles and memorizing road maps. He taught himself geometry, trigonometry, algebra, and calculus, all within a week! He enrolled in his first college-level astrophysics class when he was eight, and at twelve, he was working on expanding Einstein’s theory of relativity. Jacob has asperger’s syndrome, a mild form of autism, but instead of being treated as though he were weird, his family, professors, and classmates show him respect and support as he explores concepts most people can’t understand.

Blaise Pascal

1623–1662 MATHEMATICIAN, SCIENTIST, AND PHILOSOPHER FRANCE

No matter how little time he had left for [math], he made such strides that at the age of sixteen he wrote a paper on the conic sections which was considered such an important intellectual achievement that it was said nothing so powerful had been seen since Archimedes.

—GILBERTE PASCAL, BLAISE’S SISTER

Twelve-year-old Blaise froze silently as he waited to hear the front door close, signaling his father’s departure. With a thump, the wood door fell into place, and Blaise scurried to pull out his math notes. He’d been examining triangles and felt he was on the verge of discovering something important.

He loved shapes, but his father, Étienne, forbade him from learning mathematics, particularly geometry, until he was fifteen. Étienne believed that classic studies like Latin should be learned first and feared that his son would abandon them if he had the chance to study math. But Blaise couldn’t help himself! The fact that his father had banished all books and objects related to math only fueled his desire to study them.

Blaise tapped his quill on the corners of the triangle he’d just drawn. He realized that if he combined the angles of all the corners, they would make two right angles, ninety degrees each. He quickly drew another triangle with all different angles. It was true again!

The young mathematician was so engrossed in his discovery that he didn’t hear his father enter and walk up behind him until it was too late. He’d been found out.

What are you doing? his father asked.

Blaise loved shapes. His most famous research has to do with cones, cycloids (the curve created if you were to track the movement of a specific point on a ball as it rolled in a straight line), and triangles.

I’m . . . Blaise fumbled for a good excuse but realized he had none. I’m investigating a certain matter.

Étienne leaned over to examine his son’s notes. Without a word, he nodded, turned, and walked away. Later that night, Blaise’s father explained to him that he had discovered the truth of Euclid’s thirty-second proposition—that the angles of any triangle add up to 180 degrees.

I want you to have this. He held out a leather-bound book.

Blaise ran his fingers